breakout session overview
Orchestrating 'Excellence' - The Yahoo! India Way
Presentation Description
Some of the most common challenges with business excellence programs
include:
- Lack of strategic intent: misalignment with corporate goals and
direction
- Poor systems thinking: ignoring people and culture issues over
process efficiency goals, optimizing parts but ignoring the whole
- Weak
execution: execution challenges in a matrix organization, prioritizing
horizontal strategic programs vs. vertical delivery goals
- Inconsistent
measurement systems: tracking the real progress on a periodic basis through
a combination of hard data and insights
These typically get further
aggravated for R&D centers situated remotely, e.g. in India, as they miss
the day-to-day business context and cultural synch-ups with the mothership.
This presentation chronicles our journey and experiences as we established
Strategic PMO at Yahoo! India and created an ‘Excellence’ program, applied
systems thinking to establish four interlocking strategic pillars (Culture,
Execution, Innovation and Operations) and further created time-phased
stretch goals for each of these pillars that get tracked through an org-wide
scorecard on a quarterly basis with leadership team.
Key insights from the
presentation include aligning with corporate goals and stakeholders,
overcoming cultural barriers to systems thinking, designing a holistic
program, sustaining the focus, and running a metrics- and insights-based
closed-loop excellence program.
About the Presenter
Tathagat Varma,
Sr. Member IEEE, PMP, PRINCE2TM
Registered Practitioner, CSM, heads Corporate PMO and Business
Operations at Yahoo! Software Development India. He is responsible for
managing strategic horizontal programs across the India R&D centre.
Tathagat has an MS in Computer Science and exec MBA in
HR. Over the past 20 years, he has been engaged in product development with
Defense Research with Indian Government, and subsequently with Siemens
Telecom, Philips Medical Systems and Digital Networks divisions, Huawei
Technologies and NetScout Systems prior to joining at Yahoo. His core
expertise is large-scale product development, program management, software
engineering and general management.
Tathagat volunteers with PMI (NPDSIG) and IEEE
Technology Management Council and is a visiting faculty on Project
Management and Business Ethics courses. He also blogs on his views on
strategy, leadership, execution and management of software development at
http://www.managewell.net.
